Rating: 
Summary: Immediacy vs. Immortality
Review: The novel explores the contradiction implicit in artists, forced to live and act in the present, trying to create works that transcend time. This theme is returned to repeatedly. The protagonist is 'Hope,' a female painter who's first husband, Zack, pursues pure art in the passion of the present and achieves a place of permanence in the art world. Her second husband, more calculating and commercial, rolls up and down the hills of fame as his work becomes more or less relevant in the ensuing years. Her third husband, a businessman who personifies long-term planning, collects art but creates none himself; his contribution is fathering their children and nurturing her. Thus each husband makes a long-term contribution to the art world in proportion to their focus on the immediate: an irony not lost on the narrator--an artist herself. Reflecting this dichotomy, the book's written to take place in one day yet covers subject matter from several decades. Mr. Updike writes in that conversational, New Yorker style, yet with much longer sentences than a magazine would allow. The book has no chapters, which sustains the experience of living through one, continuous day. The result is casual prose of thoughts weaving in and out of the present, dipping into past events of interest and re-examining them in today's light. The writing sparkles with experience of finding meaning in the seeming inconsequences of daily life. Only Updike can make the description of a comfortable chair or plate-glass window breath-taking and thought-provoking. The characters are well fleshed-out, and the relationships and emotional landscape have the complex and irrational stamp of reality. The settings bring you into the art world--both urban and rural--so that you taste the energy and desperation of creative angst. Although shocked by the unnecessarily vivid sex scenes in this novel, I strongly recommend it for those who enjoy reading literature that primarily reflects on life, relationships, our struggle with mortality and our desire to transcend it. I assume the author chose the name 'Hope' for the main character to underscore her pivotal importance is guiding these tender, unstable personalities towards greatness. Indeed she outlives all her lovers--at least mentally--and can report on which ones succeeded or failed at various turns. She is a successful, late-career artist who's work has opened a new door for art and, as readers, we suspect that her success was assured. She's a born, true artist; and that's probably why these legendary artists needed her as a soulmate. Hope became their external compass, rewarded or thwarted them as needed, and moved on when they were spent.
Rating: 
Summary: Well-written and engaging
Review: This book is a realistic portrayal of a conversation between Hope, a semi-retired painter, and a young interviewer. Updike pulls off the female perspective rather well, though the extended flashbacks do become a bit complex at times. "Seek My Face" portrays a wonderful afternoon between two women and it is also a fine bit of 20th-century art history. As usual, Updike includes many well-crafted and poetic sentences. This is a warm and engaging novel.
Rating:
Summary: Well-written and engaging
Review: This book is a realistic portrayal of a conversation between Hope, a semi-retired painter, and a young interviewer. Updike pulls off the female perspective rather well, though the extended flashbacks do become a bit complex at times. "Seek My Face" portrays a wonderful afternoon between two women and it is also a fine bit of 20th-century art history. As usual, Updike includes many well-crafted and poetic sentences. This is a warm and engaging novel.
Rating:
Summary: Seek This Book
Review: This book is the brilliant reminiscing of an elderly woman-Hope-who has lived her life at the epicenter of modern art. In response to questions from a young journalist, Hope remembers her three husbands, two of them leading artists in the Fifties and Sixties. As this interview progresses, the depth and texture of Hope's reminisces-most of which are complex ruminations she does not share with the journalist-transform what is a well documented period of artistic breakthrough into an art scene alive with people and their complex dependencies. This is a narrative that imagines a person's experience in artistic history, not a thinly veiled history of art told through the eyes of an imagined minor artist (as certain critics have asserted). "Seek My Face" is another great work from one of our greatest novelist.
Rating: 
Summary: Yawn.
Review: This book seemed to have a lot of potential and I was excited to read it. However, Updike's incessant name dropping of varying 20th Century abstract expressionist painters (that had little relevance to the story except as background participants), his lofty prose and seemingly implanted facts about the cultural significance of the art of this movement became tedious and downright boring at times. I wasn't reading this book as a substitute for an Art History class I was reading this book to be told an engaging and insightful story. I feel like I got neither. The characters of Hope and Kathryn, to me, were blanks. Forward moving action in the story was nil, and Updike chose to use flashbacks in lieu of any kind of plot construction. The next time I feel like reading a book about art and its constituents I'll make sure to go to the reference section and NOT the fiction section.
Rating:
Summary: A cozy book for a crazy age
Review: Updike creates a mock interview in an old Vermont house/artist's studio. The interviewer is a contemporary Manhattanite new journalism styled reporter; the artist, a 79-year-old woman who was married to a thinly disguised Jackson Pollack (here named Zack). There is a coherence in the artist's reminiscences--a coalescence between nostalgia for an important and radical age in contemporary art, a quasi-memoir of intense life and living among the Abstract Expressionists and their contemporaries; and a meditation on aging. The title of the book is Biblical, and One gets the feeling from the artist that the age of art in the 40' through 60's was in a way antedulvian, that is of a time before the flood of media that have made images overwhelming and prepackaged, and has squeezed celebrity out of the most unimpressive, dispassionate "personalities." Updike's tenor--using his interviewee as an alter ego--reminds me of the tone of sport's books that mourn for the times when "the game really "mattered." Updike does know his art and the descriptions and analyses of various artists and paintings and milieu in the book are more prescient and enjoyable than the vacuous stuff you will find in most art magazines. If you are not familiar with the world of the book, however, i.e., Barnet Newman, Robert Motherwell, Hans Hoffman, Clement Greenberg, Frank O'hara, Franz Kline, etc., you will not be able to literally picture much of the subject matter. The writing is very competent as is usual for John Updike, and I certainly enjoyed this more than the bloated Rabbit at Rest, which should have been lain to rest in the previous installment of the Rabbit series. I'm not quite sure why some people put down Updike, but for my money, he's better than most fiction writers of his generation or the 30/40 something crowd. And if you are going to pick between reading this book, and the movie "Pollack," despite the film's valiant attempt, it's not even close in merit. Additionally, one person here was surprised that a 79 year old woman would be so open about sexuality, but the art world during the 40's and 50's was not exactly inhabited by feminine prudes.
Rating:
Summary: vintage updike
Review: Updike is a familiar room. Even though the thoughts, the words, even the intellectualism, remain the same, they don't get boring. They're comfortable. This 20th novel is less a plot driving story and more a ramble through 20th century art, both fictional and real. The observations on art are, as far as I know (not being an art scholar), insightful, and Updike does a good job weaving the "artistic" in with the "mundane" of the pricipal narrator's existence. Unfortunately Updike does not write well from a woman's perspective. There are cracks in the way the characters think and interact that reveal a male writer. The main character, an artist in her late 70s, rambles on about how quaint things were in the old days and then suddenly seems completely comfortable with a modern sexual vocabulary (would we expect anything less from Updike?); this grates because there is little indication, up to that point, that the character is anything but a vehicle for nostalgia. That being said, Updike remains an insightful observer of contemporary life, and, just when you think he's used one modern cliche too many, he comes out with a simple observation that also becomes thought provoking: "What isn't Zen in feeling, looked at blankly?" Updike has aged right along with the characters in his books, and this book, like "Toward the End of Time" and several of his most recent short stories, show someone who, while not entirely comfortable with growing old, is starting to come to terms with it. Anyone who is a fan of Updike's work should appreciate this book -- those not familiar with Updike's work would be wise to start elsewhere. Fans of Jackson Pollock might also want to take a look at it to see how he has incorporated the Naifeh biography of Pollock into his narrative.
Rating:
Summary: An extraordinary book
Review: Updike writes superbly about art -- not only the experience of seeing art but the business of art and, most interesting to me, the creative process. I was not surprised to read that he had spent a stint as an art student. This is truly a book about art, artists, and the role they play in society. He tackles this difficult topic without resorting to critics' jargon or dry exposition. The character of Hope is rendered in beautiful detail which is all the more astonishing for its insights into the female psyche. While I agree with the other reviewers that the character of Hope's second husband was too much of an amalgam to be credible, that was the only off note in an otherwise prodigious work, and the device did serve to flesh out the historical context. The ending offers an exquisite little vignette which, not wanting to spoil, I will just say was one of the most memorable literary passages I have encountered in decades of reading popular fiction.
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